Innovation Perspectives - Trendspotters' Fab Five

This is the second of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Mike Brown

Who should be deciphering the future and helping shape how a business understands and prepares for it?

The first inclination might be to think about a specific part of an organization for the function. It's important though to identify the individuals well-suited to this challenging role. From that perspective, five capabilities are vital to successfully champion this effort:

1. Having a Natural External Perspective


• Creating solid insights about the future depends on starting with a view outside, not inside the business. It's a natural orientation that not all people share. Someone in a trend-interpreting role has to be a sponge for gathering, processing, and extrapolating information on markets, customers, competitors, and a broad set of inputs on the economy, demographics, and other environmental factors.


2. Being an Integrator


• Being able to do something with a broad set of future-looking inputs requires someone with a solid perspective on the business and what drives its success. This has to be coupled with the ability to understand how other industries and markets affect the business today and imagine how they might in the future. Finally, it demands a strong command of frameworks to integrate meaningful interpretation of broad, and typically incomplete, forward-oriented data sets.


3. Possessing Both Left and Right-brained Orientations


• Ideally solid quantitative metrics (i.e., demographics, demand forecasting, industry sizing trends) are available to help form relevant predictions. Often though, numeric information isn't available. In any case, analysis has to be coupled with creating compelling stories to drive strategic actions anticipating and preparing for the future. "Whole brain thinkers" are essential, since they provide left-brain quantitative and analytical skills coupled with creative, communications-oriented right-brain perspectives to help make on-target, forward-looking action happen.


4. Displaying Strong Intuition


• There's no single clear picture of what the future holds. Creating credible future scenarios requires tremendous amounts of interpretation and extrapolation. Some of this can be learned; much of it can't. Trend watchers and prognosticators need to be able to instinctively "know" what all the information they're seeing means. If it's a broad intuitive sense, that's fantastic. Even if it's industry-specific, that can be fine too. I used to work with an economist who had been in transportation for many years and had tremendous instincts for our market. I'm not sure he could have been dropped into another industry and had the same feel, but for our market, he could look at a competitor's quarterly numbers and tell you exactly what was and would be happening in its logistics operation with high certainty.


5. Building Powerful Relationships and Networks


• It's quite a list to this point, isn't it? It's challenging for one person to excel at all of these skills. As a result, the fifth essential capability is to be an outstanding relationship builder. This includes the ability to recognize the talents necessary in others who can help shape a view of the future along with the interpersonal skills to cultivate and share value throughout the network of experts that's needed.

There are certainly other skills and capabilities which make for a strong trend watcher and interpreter. But if you can find someone in your business solidly embodying these skills, don't wait for a clearer view of the future. Get them into the job right now!


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Innovation a Prisoner of Inductive and Deductive Logic

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to attend an event hosted by the Seattle office of design firm NBBJ yesterday. The event featured Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and author of "The Design of Business" and "The Opposable Mind." I'd like to share a video interview I did with Roger before the event:

Interview - Roger Martin - Author "The Design of Business" from Braden Kelley on Vimeo.

I'd also like to share some of the key insights from Roger's talk at the event:

• People think in ways that form rules in their brains, and they are not always aware of the ways that those rules constrain them


• That which tends to get you more reliability often gets you less validity


• IQ tests have test/re-test reliability, but only 30% of life outcomes are related to IQ, 70% is attributable to other factors
  
• Emotional intelligence measures may be more valid, but not reliable


• If you insist on reliability, you can't prove in advance that your heuristic of a mystery is correct


• Innovation is a prisoner of deductive and inductive logic


• We learn to analyze quantities, but what matters more often are the qualities


• Abductive logicians welcome variance because they want to try and understand the outliers. Our modern education system beats abductive logic out of you. Are you focusing on quantities or qualities?


• We depend too much on quantities - Having more Science Technology & Math (STeM) graduates is not the way to invent the future


• Our businesses run on abstractions to help us understand the world, so new ones can be created and existing ones can be questioned


• Outliers in data can be significant sources for growth and innovation. Take the example of Intuit's QuickBooks - it was created because of the persistent existence of Quicken outliers trying to use the program to run their business instead of their personal finances.


• From the book - "It's not necessarily that some young whippersnapper's going to come up with some better idea than you. They're going to start from a different premise and they're going to come to a different conclusion that makes you irrelevant.""


• Sometimes you have to marinate on wicked problems. Instead of trying to simplify them, wade in a ways and then take a break and ruminate.


• If you live in a way that sets up your mind to determine whether things are true or false, then you can't invent the future.


• Innovation is more about combining and synthesizing existing conceptualizations and models. There are three main ways to do this:


1. Disaggregation - Target is a good example - In packaged goods, they focus on price, but in soft goods the focus on design.


2. Doubling-Down - To get the buzz of exclusivity that Cannes gets, the Toronto Film Festival pushed so hard on inclusivity that they created the buzz through the People's Choice Awards


3. Mixing - Hidden gems


• "It's not the job of the customer to invent the future."


• Quantitative and qualitative surveys force customers to make something up when they don't know how to answer


• Customers only know themselves and are happy to talk about themselves


• Interesting question - Should we be teaching intuitive thinking to science, technology and math majors? - Yes! - We should focus more energy in science on the intuitive leaps of the mind necessary to come up with interesting hypotheses.


• CEOs should see themselves as the Chief Validity Officer because of the overwhelming reliability-focus of our organizations


• Heuristics are a drug for strategy & design consultants - Often they are so busy with the heuristics that they don't take the time to push heuristics down into algorithms or to explore new mysteries

My book review of "The Design of Business" can be found here.

My previous interview with "The Design of Business" author Roger Martin can be found here.


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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

When it comes to innovation, trust your intuition

by Paul Sloane

MBA students are taught to treat business in a rational, scientific way. They analyze situations, develop financial models, critically examine management decisions and logically examine different scenarios. When they emerge from the hallowed halls of academia, they are often surprised to find that businesses run much less on logic and much more on emotion. It is not cold, intelligent analysis that drives most organizations forward. Emotional energy is often the real engine behind successful people and organisations.

Sure it helps to be analytical, intelligent and rational - but what makes people like Richard Branson, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs great business leaders is not their undoubted intelligence but their passion and commitment to their cause.

One of the richest men in Britain is Felix Dennis, who made his fortune in publishing. In 1971 he was jailed for publishing an obscene political cartoon but he was acquitted on appeal. His success started with Kung-Fu Monthly in 1974. In the 1980s he published a string of successful computer magazines. His publishing empire now spans IT, motoring, gambling and men's magazines. A recent innovation was The Week - a brief summary of all the best articles from the press each week. In his book, "How to Get Rich", he describes how he ignores conventional wisdom and sound advice from his directors, lawyers and accountants. He goes with his gut instincts instead. Time and again he trusted his intuition in making tough business decisions about innovative ventures.

Luc Mayrand, Concept Designer at Disney says, "If you find your logic is talking you out of a good idea, question the logic first, then question the idea. This is entertainment; logic is less important than the impact of the story and design."

There are many famous examples where eminent people used logic and analysis to trash an innovative idea which subsequently succeeded. Western Union turned down the telephone because they saw no need for people to chat to one another. IBM turned down Xerography when it was offered to them by its inventor Chester Carlson. Decca Records turned down the Beatles and so on.

Logic and analysis can always find fault with innovative ideas. Use these tools but use them warily. If your intuition tells you that you have a great idea then pursue it a little while longer.

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Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader published by Kogan-Page.

Design, Discovery and Humor

Here is an interesting and funny video from Ted with David Carson speaking about the importance of graphic design and intuition:



During his presentation, David Carson uses a great quote on intuition:

"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you, and you don't know how or why." - Albert Einstein

He also talks a bit about how the pendulum is swinging slighty back from simplicity in graphic design, and how as we become more digitally driven, graphic design will feature more people and more handwriting.


What do you think?


Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)